Articles

Monster Fossil Graveyard

Monster fossil graveyard found, according to articles in ABC (Australia) News in Science, BBC News and Reuters, 5 October 2006. Norwegian scientists have found a "treasure trove" of huge marine reptile fossils in Jurassic rocks on the Norwegian Island of Spitsbergen in the high Arctic. The fossils are plesiosaurs, pliosaurs and ichthyosaurs, very similar to marine reptile fossils found in southern England. One of the pliosaurs has been nicknamed "The Monster" because its 3 metre (10ft) skull indicates it is the largest pliosaur so far found. It has yet to be fully excavated but scientists estimate it is between 8 and 10 metres (27-33ft) long.

Jorn Harald Hurum, co-director of the fieldwork, said that he was surprised by the density of fossils at the site and that they are fully articulated whole skeletons, not individual bones. He commented to Reuters: "It’s rare to find so many fossils in one place – carcasses are food for other animals and usually get torn apart." The fossils are buried in fine grained black shale and the BBC article claims "after death the carcasses came to rest in mud at the bottom of the deep ocean, where little oxygen was present." Hurum claims an "unusual chemistry in the mud" could explain why they are so well preserved. He commented to the BBC: "Something happened with the chemistry that's really good for bone preservation. Some skeletons are pale white even though they're in black shale - they look like 'roadkill'.”

Editorial Comment: Hurum is correct about carcasses normally being torn up and eaten. Therefore, they could not have sunk to the bottom of the sea and waited to be slowly and gradually covered in mud and remained so well preserved. To preserve the fossils in such good condition requires rapid deep burial so that scavengers, bacteria and oxygen cannot destroy them. Furthermore to bury a lot of monstrous creatures requires a monstrous amount of mud. This fossil site has all the characteristics of a sudden, large catastrophic event which eliminates vast times form the Geologic record as only rapid events will accumulate vast fossil beds, and this is the type of Catastrophic evidence you would expect following the global flood of Noah's day and its disrupting consequences over the following centuries. See Genesis 6-9 (Ref. Norway, catastrophe)